"Besides, it wouldn't be fair to Anita," he explained. "Your servants
would scorn to take orders from her, and I want her to learn the dignity
of a married woman with responsibilities of her own. That's the first
step toward being the perfect hostess. She's the sweetest girl in the
world, but she's timid and distrustful of herself. I want her to know her
own worth, and then it won't be long before everyone around her knows
it."
There was no answer to this except acquiescence, which Dick and Constance
were obliged to give. They did give it: the more readily because they
were inclined to suspect a hidden hint, a pill between layers of jam.
If the girl had been transferred from the earth to Mars, the new
conditions of life could scarcely have been more different from the old
than was life in Portman Square married to Nelson Smith, from the
treadmill as Mrs. Ellsworth's slave-companion. What the Portman Square
experiences of the bride would have been if Knight had allowed the
Annesley-Setons to begin by ruling it would be dangerous to say. But he
had taken his stand; and without guessing that she owed her freedom of
action to her husband's strength of will, she revelled in it with a joy
so intense that it came close to pain.
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